Antonio Navalón
I promise not to watch AMLO’s morning press conference shows anymore. I promise that from now on, my brain will be dedicated to thinking of something Mr. President has not suggested. I promise I will remember that the solution to all our problems lies in us and not in what others do or do not do. I do not know if the President of Mexico likes or dislikes making balance sheets; I do know that – given what we have seen – he does not want to be kept accountable for what he has done or has not done. It is difficult not to do this exercise when you have a situation in which, since the beginning of the year, he has done nothing but accumulate one setback after another. Since the beginning of the year, every initiative made by President López Obrador’s administration has been accompanied by an obstacle or an outcome different from what was planned.
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to be at the side of one of the true architects – together with King Emeritus Juan Carlos I – of Spanish democracy: Adolfo Suárez. This great Spanish leader used to say that power begins to be lost when an order is given and not carried out. It is true that, in the human condition, waiting to see the capacity of damage they have to inflict on us is everything. When asked if we are okay with something, our brain immediately acts based on two impulses. The first is guided by interest or curiosity to act on what is being questioned. And the second one is governed by the conviction of acting consciously and defending what one believes in. Although, if there are no other options, decision-making naturally becomes more difficult. Today in Mexico, we find ourselves in a clear dilemma in which we do not even know what we believe, much less – and worse – what we really want. Or maybe deep inside us, we do know, but it is one thing to know it and quite another to act to get it.
Like everything else in life, power also runs out and wears out at a certain time. At the moment we are born, we all have a clause tattooed on our skin that we will inevitably fulfill one day, which will mean our departure from this world. There are no exceptions to this, nor is there anyone who can be saved, not even the true child of God. It seemed that the time would never come when the previous regime would be definitively terminated and that – without traces or evidence of what existed before – nothing and no one would have the strength, the conviction, or of course, the divine mandate to be able to change what had been done.
It does not matter whether young, old, or in good or bad health; the reality is that to date, I have not met any ruler who, after sitting in the chair, does not think that he was born to occupy that place and, what is worse, that he will die doing so. Democracy has an ultimate meaning and conviction that it is the people who, in theory, decide who will govern them. Likewise, an efficient democratic system must also have the freedom and the power to remove from office those who have already fulfilled their mandate or have not delivered the expected results.
We are currently in a situation where what is happening against democracy is much more important and profound than a simple electoral date. There may be a change in power, although, as things stand, we are facing a transcendental change in our Constitution and our legal system. We cannot be mistaken; in the fights that have been waged since the beginning of the year, subsists the most essential part of the continuity of our democratic system that no one gave us as a gift. The problem is that no one except us can defend it, and I do not want to suggest alternatives or what should happen. What is a fact is that President Lopez Obrador has successfully destroyed the forces of the opposition with a great collaboration of the forces of the opposition itself.
Since I was a child, I learned that it is tough to have the State against you, but it is much worse to live without the existence of a State. We seem to have focused on destroying the structures of what we knew as the Mexican State, although it is still unclear how we want to build the foundations and the system that will govern our future. To achieve this, we need a critical element fundamental to the people’s hope: education. However, this cornerstone of our society seems to be neither in the minds of the current administration nor in the minds of the opposition or anyone else, and that in itself is a serious crime.
Since the time of José Vasconcelos in our country, the decision has been made to change bullets for books to trace the new history of modern Mexico. Education goes – or should go – beyond any budget allocation or campaign promises; it is something intrinsic to societies and should be one of the main priorities for those in power. However, one of the biggest victims and one of the worst consequences of the implementation of republican austerity by the 4T is education. In Mexico, there are millions of children wandering the streets who have not had the opportunity to return to the classroom after the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS-19 pandemic. The saddest part of all this is that these youngsters will probably never set foot in an educational classroom again, as the amount of money allocated for hiring teachers, creating or adapting facilities, or even for school breakfast – which for many children represented their only safe meal of the day – is increasingly less or even non-existent. And these resources have been decimated or have simply disappeared in the hands of the true believers of the dogma of this new regime.
The crime against the education system stains and involves all of us. If before we were not aware enough to see the disastrous reality our country’s educational system was going through, now we have to settle for seeing more children armed and belonging to organized crime groups than children with a textbook sitting at their desks. It is incomprehensible and inconceivable that, in a country like ours, with apparently so many resources, millions of children do not have access to an education, let’s not say dignified, but basic.
This whole situation is aggravated when we remember the educational system reform carried out by the first Secretary of Public Education of the 4T – now Mexico’s Ambassador to the United States – Esteban Moctezuma. We are letting the education system die, not because of legal abandonment, but because of lack of resources and because it must be confessed without shame; education is not one of their priorities. The education system does not fall within the only thing that defines our country and our regime: what Mr. President thinks, what he wants, and how he spends his time.
In the meantime, we will continue not living in unreality, but knowing that although Don Quixote mistook windmills for enemy giants – not of the 4T, but of his brain’s impulses – we have insisted on delaying what is inevitable. And what can no longer wait is the installation of the world’s most critical economic, political, and social facts, which we know as CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC.
From the beginning of the administration, this regime sought to characterize itself as putting the poor first and as the most important Mexican humanist regime, there has ever been. But the truth is that it is a regime that only cries for history. And it is complicated to find gestures in moments, such as the one that recently took place in Ciudad Juarez, that make it possible to analyze the responsibility that we have collectively and individually in this kind of barbarism like the one that happened last week. It is inhuman to see how the fire began to burn, and the padlocks still did not open, but even more incredible was how the State leaders took no responsibility, blaming each other. Undoubtedly, this issue will end up in court, and naturally, no matter how many times they turn around and how much they pass the buck, the government will be the guilty party.
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